As the first crowd of customers filed into Panera's nonprofit restaurant here, only the honor system kept them from taking all the food they wanted for free.

Ronald Shaich, Panera's chairman, admitted as he watched them line up that he had no idea if his experiment would work. The idea for Panera's first nonprofit restaurant was to open an eatery where people paid what they could. The richer could pay full price — or extra. The poorer could get a cheap or even free meal.

A month later, the verdict is in: It turns out people are basically good...

if people don't pay, they feel like jerks.
this happens all the time.
at regular restaurants, it's pretty much expected that everyone leave a tip.
even at small community functions, there's sometimes hotdogs or whatever with "suggested donation: $3"
and everyone pays it. because nobody wants to look stingy

but genuinely poor people are going to use it as they need to, I think.

I could see my mother going to one of those and just taking armfuls, though. she does that with food banks...

I remember hearing about a similar experiment, involving video games. People could choose to download a bundle of games for however much they wanted to pay. The bundle of games was estimated to cost around $80 retail. The average person paid a little over $8 dollars.

It's interesting to see how different people are when they aren't anonymous.